| The Beast in View | |
| Setting: | boarding house in Kings Cross, Sydney |
| Premiere: | 1959 |
| Place: | Union Hall, Adelaide |
| Orig Lang: | English |
| Genre: | drama |
The Beast in View is a 1959 Australian stage play by John Hepworth.[1]
The play won a competition to select an Australian play for the first Adelaide Festival of Arts, but was rejected for production. The University of Adelaide Theatre Guild then staged it in a censored version.[2]
Reviewing a 1961 production, The Bulletin said "The play is in fact completely incoherent. I think the trouble is that Mr Hepworth was so busy trying to reproduce the surface of life, which' he does well, that he forgot about making an artistic whole." The Age called it an "uneven play" but said it "had a certain vigor, an eye for character and a feeling for the spoken idiom."[3]
The Sydney Morning Herald, reviewing a 1962 Sydney production at the Pocket Playhouse, criticised the play's "numbing badness."[4]
A copy of the play is at the Fryer Library at the University of Queensland.[5]